Escrúpulos Una piedra en la conciencia del software libre, calidad y la vida misma

The sprint is now over and almost everybody is back home. By this time, Cristian is probably taking his plane or already in flight and I'm to take the plane back home tonight.

The schedule was packed with overviews of the applications, possible integration use cases and ideas to work together, everything in a very good atmosphere. This was my first sprint and it was amazing to see everyone work so hard and in such a good mood.

Also, as expected from a German location, we had good beers every night, and in good variety.

Now, for the concrete results. First, I think the meeting reinforced the bonds among developers, giving even more strength to the idea of "working together where it makes sense, and having a friendly competition where our features overlap".

Then, we worked on the icons for our applications and we already sent a list to the Oxygen team requesting our needs, and we got a response from them already. Yay! 

Of course, during the whole sprint there was code written and debugged, no matter the application, and experiences were shared about our work within the KDE framework, since all our applications are relatively new to the KDE processes and repository.

Last but not least, we dedicated most of the time to work on the idea of what used to be FinanceStack, now Alkimia. Many different use cases were laid out, for integration not only among finance apps but with the rest of the desktop. It is, from my humble point of view, a very powerful idea, which can start small and grow bigger over time as it is put to use by more and more applications. Guillaume has already blogged about some concrete examples, but I think more possibilities will unfold as the real stuff comes to life and it is used in the real world. Surely, we will have some rough times when that happens, but it is to be expected when you are pushing the boundaries.

In every review of KDE I have seen the integration among applications highlighted as one of its strengths. After this sprint, I can say that is just a collateral effect of the people in the community working together. "I have this you can use", "You can take a look at that if it works for you", "We could do this and that together" were all common sentences during the sprint, and it shows on the design and ideas behind Alkimia, since it is not only an integration framework, but it opens the possibility to share code among our applications.

Who knows, perhaps in the future we share a common platform, like Kontact is for KDE PIM?